Zamira: Screen Still
The possible is always dependent on what confronts us and what resources we have to address it. Climate refugees face the most uncertain of possibilities as they often move across hostile spaces to face the barest of hopeful outcomes. Such movement is intensifying as the incidence of climate extremes, such as droughts, are wreaking havoc on people’s vulnerable ways of life. For example, few realise that the origin of the Syrian civil war in 2011 was an unprecedented drought that drove rural popula-tions into the cities to look for work and support, only to be met by brutal force. The resulting refugee surge into Europe and Australasia resulted in the majority of the Syrian population now living outside Syria. The aesthetic challenge this experience poses for art is immense.
Samira avoids representing the refugees themselves but focuses on their unprecedented experiences. It offers as its subject the oceanic experience of a Syrian refugee, her terrifying ocean crossing from In-donesia to Australia, the disconcerting sounds of rescue by a Norwegian tanker helicopter and subse-quent refusal of entry to Australia. However there are no images of the refugee. Instead we are con-fronted by the climate itself, in the form of an unpredictable ocean whose behavior interacts with the audience’s uncertain movement across the installation space. Here, the possible is twofold, the oceanic and the human. In the installation, the immersive oceanic projection is algorithmic and goal oriented, based on an AI language that animates the unanticipated. The human is tentative, as the audience at-tempts to navigate its way across the totally unfamiliar oceanic terrain. Paradoxically, this refugee experience foreshadows the unimaginable one we all increasingly face as the planet and its atmosphere burns in unforeseen ways.
Zamira: Installation view
- Overview
- News
Project Director: Dennis Del Favero
Programmer: Alex Ong
Project Title: Samira
2022
Computer Graphic Video. 4K. 4mins. Single Channel. BW. Stereo